"For him, if everyone shared what they knew, there’d be no more war"

Christophe
Tricot wrote a thesis about "knowledge mapping". In the middle of his research
he came across the work of Paul Otlet.

Otlet
was self-taught and a little mad, but he came up some incredible concepts. He
didn't invent the Internet, but he
laid down the foundations of what we now call the semantic web.

He wanted
to create a common reference for all cultures so that they could exchange
information easily. He thought up the idea of putting all of humanity's
knowledge in indexed files, organised in a way that they would be easily
exploitable. It seems as though his findings were the basis for the concept of a
hypertext.

Otlet also
wanted to centralise all files in a big library - a kind of Wikipedia, but
where all the content would be validated by experts. He imagined that we'd be
able to access these documents, whether audio, video text or whatever, anywhere
in the world, by having them sent to a screen with speakers. That seems pretty
obvious now, but not in 1934!

Otlet was a
utopian. For him, if everyone shared what they knew, there'd be no more war. He
proposed to the League of Nations [the first incarnation of the UN] that they sponsor his library, but it never happened. He had a small family fortune, but in the
end he died completely ruined and alone. He'd asked many countries to fund his
project - even Hitler's Germany."